Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) is an interface commonly deployed inside a base station. CPRI enables communication between the radio equipment and the radio equipment control. In some applications it is desirable to set up a CPRI over a delay sensitive network so that the radio equipment can remain at the remote site while the radio equipment control is located in a data center. Each CPRI flow is a constant bit rate flow with a constant source and destination. CPRI flows may be added or removed when a base station is added or removed. As such, they are relatively static and are not typically subject to frequent change in current third and fourth generation wireless networks.
CPRI has a tight jitter requirement of several nanoseconds. In existing applications jitter is handled by buffering traffic at the receiver. When using a receiver buffer the size of the buffer needs to be engineered to guarantee the jitter requirements which may be dependent on the characteristics of the fronthaul network. The receiver buffer introduces delay into the CPRI flows. This delay is accounted for in a CPRI delay budget, which may reduce the allowable propagation delay in the fronthaul network. By consuming part of the CPRI delay budget to account for receiver buffers, there may be an offsetting reduction in the coverage area of a radio equipment controller. Other approaches are based on using optical networks for fronthaul networks. However, optical networks may not be practical to build in some scenarios. Another approach is based on using Ethernet networks to carry CPRI traffic. However, outside of creating a dedicated point to point connection using Ethernet networking equipment, an Ethernet network cannot typically guarantee the low jitter requirements of a CPRI deployment.